A year into Donald Trump’s presidency resurgent
white supremacists are preaching hate. Now left- wing activists are hitting
back with their own shock tactics. The ABC’s Stephanie March goes inside a
controversial radical group.

They call themselves Redneck Revolt.

They’re a citizens’ militia that totes guns in the
name of community defence.

A right wing neo-Nazi group? Just the opposite.

I would argue we’re in a new civil war – Dwayne Dixon, Redneck Revolt

With chapters spreading across America, Redneck
Revolt is a left-wing counter to white supremacists who have found voice and
vigour under Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s part of a broad new movement of
self-proclaimed anti-fascists and anti-racists called “Antifa”. But
some Antifa tactics are too extreme even for many on their own side.

There’s a Nazi over there with a gun. I wanna
make sure I’ve got a gun too – Jeff,
Redneck Revolt

Correspondent Stephanie March obtains rare access to
the at times secretive men and women of Redneck Revolt as they plot to
disrupt white supremacist rallies in America’s South.

Among the Redneck Revolt counter-protesters is
Dwayne Dixon. The softly spoken, vegan anthropology professor is as
comfortable carrying an AR-15 assault rifle as he is in the classroom.

When the left uses violence, in the rare case that
it happens, it’s resistance. To paraphrase poorly George Orwell, the best
offence against tyranny is a rifle over the fireplace of every working man – Dwayne Dixon

To Dwayne Dixon, evidence of that tyranny is seen in
the growing number of hate crimes against African-Americans, Muslims and
immigrants. A key player in the white nationalist movement is Matthew
Heimbach, once described as the youthful, affable face of hate in
America. Preying on white Americans’ fears of becoming a “hated and
despised” minority, Matthew Heimbach wants a whites-only homeland within the
USA.

We’re the ones that were able to settle and build
our nation. We were able to come and conquer it and create this civilisation.
This isours –
Matthew Heimbach

His stated ambition for a white Christian Utopia
strains credulity. More believable is the immediate aim to normalise
racism.

America is a house on fire… A multicultural America
leads to tension – Matthew
Heimbach

Antifa groups like Redneck Revolt argue that
Americans are foolish to dismiss the rise of supremacist groups.

Back 10 years ago there were a handful. Today there
are many more. You organise against these small groups as if they could be
the starting points of future murderous movements… and you stand up to them
by any means necessary – Mark
Bray, left wing scholar and author

I’m not going to let people fly swastikas freely on
the streets of the United States – Dwayne
Dixon

Helicopter.
GFX:
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

00:00

Protestors
and riot police

00:04

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Remember this?

00:06

Music

00:10

Protests
over Trump’s inauguration

STEPHANIE
MARCH: A year ago, left wing activists
venting their rage at Donald Trump’s inauguration – the beginning of a
presidency that’s brought extremists from both sides out into the open.

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “We have a right to this land, we paid for it in our own blood and
our own sacrifice and no one has a right to take it away from us”.

00:43

Counter
protest rally

PROTESTORS: “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist
USA!”

STEPHANIE MARCH: Now the radical left is more
organised.

00:49

PROTESTORS: “Black lives they matter here!”

STEPHANIE MARCH: They’re called “Antifa” –
self-proclaimed anti-racist, anti-fascists whose tactics shock even some on
their own side.

00:57

Dixon
from top of car

DWAYNE
DIXON: [yelling at protestors at march] “Go over there and get ready to get
hit!”

01:08

Dixon
interview

“I
would argue we’re in a new civil war”.

01:10

Antifa
members with guns

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Tonight, inside one far left group taking up arms they say to protect
America from neo-Nazis.

01:12

Dixon

DWAYNE
DIXON: “I’m not going to let people fly swastikas freely on the streets of
the United States”.

01:25

Child
raises hand in Nazi salute

MAN:
All right son, put it down.

01:31

Rural
Tennessee. March driving

Music

01:37

GFX:REDNECK REVOLT

01:43

GFX:
Reporter: STEPHANIE MARCH

01:53

STEPHANIE
MARCH: We’re in rural Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. A
century and a half later, racism isn’t bothering to hide its face like the
Klan once did.

02:00

March
to camera

[driving]
“We’re heading to Shelbyville in Tennessee where a group of white
nationalists are holding a rally that they’re calling “White Lives
Matter”. We know counter protestors are going to be there too, and if
past events are anything to go by, it could get ugly”.

01:14

Rural
Tennessee GVs

Music

02:30

Café
in Shelbyville

02:48

Deserted
streets of Shelbyville

STEPHANIE MARCH: Ahead of tomorrow’s rally, the city centre
is virtually deserted, locals are on edge.

02:54

Dorothy
interview

DOROTHY
FANNIN: “No one’s happy about it. This doesn’t represent Shelbyville,
doesn’t represent who we are, people are afraid. Almost everybody on
the square closing their doors. I guess that’s our way of saying we
don’t want it here”.

02:59

Shelbyville
GVs

Music

03:16

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Almost 200 years old, this small city in middle Tennessee on the bank
of the Duck River is best known for breeding horses and was once a pencil
manufacturing hub. It rankles that the white nationalists are from out
of town and have targeted Shelbyville for its growing population of Somali
and Latin American migrants doing low skilled jobs.

03:22

Dorothy
interview

DOROTHY
FANNIN: “I don’t want Shelbyville to be known as the place where the white
supremacy rally was held and violence broke out and people were killed or run
over or beaten up or anything like that, because that’s not Shelbyville,
that’s not who we are”.

03:53

Police
or rooftop/preparing for protest

04:05

POLICE:
“Where’s the gas mask?”

04:11

STEPHANIE
MARCH: The next day this city of 21,000 looks like it is preparing for an
invasion.

04:15

Police
scan protestors

POLICE OFFICER: “Put everything on the table”.

04:25

Journalist
with protestor holding Black Lives Matter sign

FEMALE
JOURNALIST: “It’s clear by your signs, but which side are you out here
supporting?”

PROTESTOR:
“I’m on the counter protest”.

04:32

Various.
People in counter protest area.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Police are as worried about the far right as they are the far left,
those who call themselves Antifa – anti-fascists.

04:39

Brandi
watches drone overhead

BRANDI
CAMPBELL: [drone overhead] “Is that to make sure none of the rascally
leftists get all crazy?”

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Brandi Campbell lives in the state next door, North Carolina. A
few months ago, she joined the local branch of a national far left group
called Redneck Revolt. They claim to be anti-fascist, anti-racist and
anti-capitalist and are sometimes armed.

04:51

Arrival
of white supremacists

MAN:
All folks, they’re coming in… Put up a fist in solidarity…

BRANDI
CAMPBELL: “This is not normal. This isn’t acceptable.

05:12

Brandi
watches arrival of white supremacists

Now
we see this narrative that is completely condoned and even promoted by the
President, by cabinet numbers allowing really evil and detrimental ideology
to take root”.

05:22

Brandi yelling at other side

“You are not Christian!... They are
pieces of shit. No that is simplistic. I’m sure that some of them are
mentally ill. Personally. I think that some of them are consumed by
evil. How to you explain people who allow themselves to sell that kind
of rhetoric? That’s evil”.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Across the barricades is white nationalist

05:36

Heimbach
at protest

leader
Matthew Heimbach – once described as the youthful, affable face of hate in
America. His group is just one of 1600 extremist groups active in the
US at both ends of the political spectrum.

06:08

PROTESTOR: “We care about your children and the future
of our race”.

06:22

March
with Heimbach at protest

STEPHANIE
MARCH: I first met him a couple of years ago when his group, the
Traditionalist Worker Party, had just a handful of members. Now he
claims to have a thousand followers, still tiny but since Donald Trump’s
rise, extremist fringe groups on both sides are growing in numbers and
influence.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Heimbach wants a homeland for whites only in the US, a segregated
Utopia in middle America where people of colour are not welcome.

07:03

March
interviews Heimbach

“What’s wrong with having a multi-cultural America?”

07:11

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “A multi-cultural America leads to tension as we see all over the
world. Multiculturalism leads to strife. So, we think everyone has a
right to their own land, but we have a right to this land. We paid for it in
our own blood and our own sacrifice and no one has a right to take it away
from us”.

07:15

Counter-protestors

PROTESTOR:
“You guys forgot your sound system, you forgot your people, you forgot your
robes, you forgot your swastikas. You were going to bus in Nazis from
Detroit in your own form of affirmative action and they’re not here.
Sad Nazis. We came!”

07:30

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Hate crimes mainly targeting African Americans, Muslims and immigrants
have increased two years in a row across the country and they’re on track to
rise for a third. The goal of groups like Matthew Heimbach’s is to
normalise racism.

07:75

Heimbach
yelling from behind barricade

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “White working people will fight! We will march! We will
struggle! We will ensure the existence of our people and a future for
white children. Because our people have a right to exist. That
message is simple”.

08:02

March
interviews Heimbach

STEPHANIE
MARCH: “Why do you think that whites have a right to America though?”

08:24

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “Well we’re the ones that were able to settle, to build our nation
here. We were able to come and conquer it and build and be able to
create this civilisation. This is ours”.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: “In terms of a right to be here, why go back two or three or four
generations and say those people should move, why not go all the way back to
the first people that were here and say everyone that came after should get
out?”

08:30

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “Well because we made treaties for this land and we won it fair and
square”.

08:51

White nationalists/Police

STEPHANIE
MARCH: The white nationalists here are outnumbered and drowned out by their
more vocal opponents. Still, they claim a propaganda victory.

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “You don’t just have to physically

08:55

Heimbach

hear
us speak. By recording our speeches, doing videos, playing them online, the
media, allows us to be able to continue to reach even more people than the
ones that came out to join us”.

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “All right ladies and gentlemen. You did an amazing job today so
everyone load up, get together, let’s form this convoy up because, this is
fundamentally about us as one big family. So, thank you guys and heil
victory”.

09:54

Guy
does Nazi salute

PROTESTORS: “Heil victory”.

10:07

Protestors
drive to pub

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Heimbach’s group cap off the day’s work with a visit to the pub where
they brawl with a mixed-race couple.

10:12

Brawl
at pub

MAN:
Oh my god, she’s bleeding.

10:21

Durham
GVs

STEPHANIE
MARCH: We want to know more about the
people on the other side who call themselves anti-fascists or
Antifa.

10:38

Brandi
driving

So
we’ve come to Durham in North Caroline with Brandi Campbell, the protestor we
met in Shelbyville.

BRANDI
CAMPBELL: “Redneck Revolt is really anti-fascist, anti-racist, community
support group and I joined over the summer”.

10:50

Brandi
arrives at Dwayne’s house

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Redneck Revolt says its movement is growing rapidly. From a handful of
chapters a year ago, they claim there are now more than 30 nationwide.

11:14

Antifa meeting

Unlike
many Antifa activists, these Redneck Revolt members have agreed to let us
show their faces. Though it took lengthy persuasion to be granted this
access. Anti-fascist groups have been criticised by both the right and
the left for their willingness to use force. They risk a backlash from
the far right and police, but also from their own employers and families.

11:38

Today
it’s medical training at member Dwayne Dixon’s house. The goal, they
say, is to be a broad community support group and helping people be
self-sufficient in all aspects of their lives. They run food banks and
do first aid training, but their most striking feature is their commitment to
armed self-defence.

12:05

Jeff
addresses meeting

JEFF:
[at meeting] “But nobody really wants to get shot. Most folks don’t
want to be a martyr, so it’s like you’re there, I’m here. Neither one
of us gets shot. I have a gun, you have a gun, everybody be cool.
It’s that scary point that our armed society is a polite society so the
reality is if there’s a Nazi over there with a gun, I want to make sure I’ve
got a gun too”.

ELORY:
“And I want to make sure he knows that I have a gun”.

12:27

[continues]

DWAYNE
DIXON: “I think that also really delineates us, you know maybe most
accurately say the far left, but maybe people who just value autonomy,
right? Communal and individual autonomy and freedom over
fascists. The fascists are coming for you”.

12:53

Dwayne
cleaning his guns

“I
grew up in a military family on my father’s side.

13:12

His
uncle, my great uncle, was a marine. My grandfather was a bomber pilot
during World War II and then my father was a career army officer. Also,
my parents are fundamentalist Baptists so I always say that I grew up with
the sword of the Lord in one hand

13:17

and
the sword of the State in the other”.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Dwayne Dixon is an anthropology professor who joined Redneck Revolt in
2016. Reclaiming the word “redneck” is supposed to be a salute to
America’s rural working class, a group he sees as downtrodden. Redneck
Revolt is about taking back power from government and big business.

13:33

March
with Dixon

DWAYNE
DIXON: “It’s always profits over people. It’s always about the richest people
trying to increase their bottom line at the benefit of the rest of us.

13:55

To sort of paraphrase, poorly, George Orwell who says
that the best defence against tyranny is a rifle over the fireplace of every
working man – I would say working person – that may seem really simplistic
and I’m not in any way advocating that people need to be always out in the
streets, but there is some way that I think it’s important for us to think
about the capacity for defence, for community defence”.

14:02

STEPHANIE MARCH: “How do you justify the use of
violence as a tactic?”

14:32

DWAYNE
DIXON: “When the left uses violence, in the rare cases that it happens, it’s
resistance. But when those actions are taken it’s because some other
kind of threat has already materialised and therefore that danger coming from
far-right action justifies and necessitates some kind of intervention with
force”.

14:36

Charlottesville
Unite the Right 2016 rally

Music

14:54

STEPHANIE
MARCH: It was this event I Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2016 that
galvanised many anti-fascist groups including Redneck Revolt.

PROTESTORS:
“You will not replace us! You will not replace us!”

STEPHANIE
MARCH: The Unite the Right Rally

15:00

was
described as the largest far right gathering in a generation. White
nationalist groups marched against city council plans to remove a statue of
its civil war general, only to be met by counter protestors.

15:17

Dixon
interview

DWAYNE
DIXON: “This is not just about free speech, right. These are people with
clearly stated intention to carry out violence against people of colour,
against queer folks, against women. And they’re not just speaking,
they’re marching. They’re marching in a way that you know is intimidating, as
we all know is clearly harking back to the torch light rallies of the Nazi
era”.

15:34

Redneck Revolt protestors

STEPHANIE
MARCH: The next day the fight continued.

16:00

Redneck
Revolt came armed. They intentionally hung back from the main clashes.

DWAYNE
DIXON: “Our purpose was to provide a static community defence
perimeter. Our goal was to never move around, to never intimidate by
being a mobile unit

16:13

Dixon
interview

that
would somehow suggest possible violence through carrying our weapons through
the streets. We were just going to protect the perimeter of the park.
We stayed on the sidewalk the entire day. We didn’t venture out into
the surrounding environs of the city, that we are really a known entity”.

16:28

STILLS.
Redneck Revolt in Charlottesville with guns

STEPHANIE
MARCH: They say they were invited by a black anarchist group to provide
protection, but many on the left were shocked to see their own side carrying
weapons.

we
knew that we were being intensely scrutinised, yeah that we weren’t
necessarily a welcome presence.

17:13

Still.
Dixon at protest with guns

That
maybe we were disrupting their optics. My personal rejoinder would be
like well who’s worrying about optics when people might actually be killed?”

17:18

Scuffles
and fighting at protest

STEPHANIE
MARCH: The weapons didn’t stop the chaos. Police failed to
intervene and were later pilloried for their inaction. There was
violence on both sides, but the right took it to a new level.

17:27

Protestor
fires gun

PROTESTOR: “Hey nigger!”

17:42

Montage
of confrontations

17:50

Car
rams counter protestors

PROTESTORS
[chant]: Our streets… Our streets…

18:00

PROTESTOR:
“Holy shit. Holy shit. That Nazi just drove into people”.

18:10

STILL.
Car ram

STEPHANIE
MARCH: A white supremacist allegedly drove his car into a group of counter
protestors, injuring more than 30 people and killing 32-year-old Heather
Heyer.

18:17

Aftermath
of car ram

PROTESTOR:
[to police officer arriving at scene] “Somebody might be dead folks. Somebody
might…holy shit! The cops, just now getting here. Where the fuck were you?”

18:28

Dixon
interview

DWAYNE
DIXON: “What happened in Charlottesville is pretty unimaginable. It’s
unimaginable in its incoherence that this is the United States”.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: “And how did you feel leaving Charlottesville?”

18:40

DWAYNE
DIXON: “Like I had left a battlefield. Clearly, no one could have
predicted what it turned into, this really striking watershed moment in
contemporary US history”.

18:51

STEPHANIE MARCH: “What’s it done for groups on the
left?”

19:03

DWAYNE
DIXON: “I think it’s made people have a much higher degree of vigilance to
recognise that dangers might be much closer to home than they imagined”.

19:06

Vigil
for Heather Heyer

19:24

Durham
GVs

Music

19:27

Dixon
walking through crowd

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Dwayne Dixon’s home in Durham is just a few hour’s drive south of
Charlottesville. It’s a progressive bubble in the conservative south, a
university town that grew rich from cigarettes.

19:44

Dixon
at food truck

“So
Durham’s rapidly changed in the last 10 years. It’s gone through a
dramatic shift from being a tobacco town, and when I moved here you used to
still be able to smell tobacco in the summer on a hot humid day, that
changed.

20:05

Food
trucks

But
I think what’s really important is to recognise it’s still in the south and
even though there is a kind of, the luxury of a liberal bubble where people
don’t really have to confront a lot of the problems that are pervasive
throughout the United States, that it only takes a short drive, 10 miles or
more up the road and you really do enter rural Southern America and it’s not
as simple or as stereotypical as one might imagine”.

20:20

Activist
tears down statue

20:50

STEPHANIE
MARCH: In the days after the violence in Charlottesville, local activists in
Durham tore down a statue dedicated to the civil war soldiers who fought in
defence of slavery.

20:55

Woman
addressing crowd

PROTESTOR:
“The KKK has applied for a permit to march at four right here in
Durham”.

21:10

White
nationalist to black woman

WHITE
NATIONALIST: You all hate me, but I can’t hate you.

21:24

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Rumours of a Ku Klux Khan rally in town prompted Dixon to hit
the streets. He believes the police are too accommodating of the far
right.

21:27

Protestors
march

DWAYNE
DIXON: “This is shades of Charlottesville all over again

21:37

Dixon
interview

in terms of the way law enforcement was noticeably
absent.

21:42

Dwayne
holding his AR-15 directing people on the street, bystander confronts him

Getting out of the car, I made this really clear choice
to take my rifle with me”.

MALE PROTESTOR: [to Dwayne carrying his rifle] “Get the
fuck out of here”.

DWAYNE DIXON: “Yep, alright, fine.

21:45

Dixon
addressing protestors from
top of car

Some
of you are willing to put your shit down, go over there and get ready to get
hit”.

21:55

People
burning KKK flag

STEPHANIE
MARCH: The KKK never came but Dwayne and those who tore down the statue
were charged with multiple offences.

22:00

Dixon
interview

“Would you do it again?”

DWAYNE DIXON: “I’ve thought about this a lot, like,
like replayed that day.

22:09

Carrying
a rifle one, it insists upon my rights as a citizen to have the means for my
own self-defence when the State is absent or unwilling to actually intervene.

22:14

The sheriff was not protecting the people in the
street”.

22:24

STEPHANIE MARCH: “It sounds like you would do it
again”.

22:27

DWAYNE
DIXON: “I would definitely do it again. I’m not going to willingly stand-by,
I’m not going to be passive or a spectator or fall back behind some kind of
centrist line that outsources resistance to fascism, say to the State, like
imagining the police will quote do their job. Because I would argue
they have a stake in the far-right ideology. I mean incarceration rates,
deportation rates, endless war against people abroad. There’s an
imperialist endeavour that the US has undertaken and the far right, while
they’re not within the government, they represent arguably an extension of a
line of thinking that travels through the United States Government into that
territory”.

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Extreme circumstances can create strange bedfellows and they don’t
come much more strange than this. Dwayne Dixon and his leftist crew
have come to meet Chance Allen – a member of an armed militia called the
American Pit Vipers – in the hope of forming an unusual alliance.

23:48

Allen
is a Trump voter. His group is committed to aiding law enforcement and
defending free speech, including by the far right. He first encountered
Redneck Revolt at a pro-Trump rally when one of his members tried to assault
one of theirs.

24:07

Allen
interview

“What did you think about Antifa groups a year ago?”

CHANCE ALLEN: “A year ago? It was just complete utter
hatred. And that’s all there was to it.

24:26

From
what I thought originally that they were just 100% anti-Americans and after
coming to find out most of it was, you know fake made up stuff anyhow”.

24:37

Gun
training

STEPHANIE
MARCH: Shocked by the violence in Charlottesville, both groups now recognise
a common cause in civil defence.

24:47

CHANCE
ALLEN: “Yeah at one time I was solid, Unite the Right, but then it comes back
down to once I started seeing the bullshit out there and wanting to know the
facts and get to learn, that’s when I started realising it’s, we the people
means we the people. We’re all the people. You know most media wouldn’t
cover this because we’re not here to shoot each other”.

24:55

Dixon
interview

DWAYNE
DIXON: “Yeah I really don’t imagine this to be some kind of conversion
crusade, but it really is trying to establish lines of affiliation, lines of
affection even. I’m trying to get them to point their guns in the right
direction.

25:20

For
us, having access to weapons and having the skill and competency with them,
allows us to at least consider that among a diversity of possible
tactics. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be used all the time,
but recognising the moment we’re in, when real white terrorist violence is a
fact of American life, and we know that this is a real danger and we’re not
willing to abdicate our own security to the State.

25:40

March
at gun training

STEPHANIE
MARCH: These groups do not represent mainstream America. Out of a
population of more than 320 million, they’re on the fringe. But in a country
awash with weapons, the growing divisiveness signals a deeply troubling
shift. As we saw by their strong presence at Shelbyville, police are
taking the threat of violence more seriously. Both sides say they’ll do
whatever it takes.

26:05

Heimbach
interview

MATTHEW
HEIMBACH: “America is a house on fire and flooding simultaneously, you know
in a crafty and horror hell scape My children’s life depends on me to
be able to build them a better world to grow up in and I don’t want them to
grow up in this one as a hated and despised minority on the land that their
ancestors gave their blood and their lives to build for them.

26:33

No
one would question if I were to say, you know, if my family was drowning or
in a house fire, if I would be able to run in and grab my family and get them
to safety, even if it would cost my own life. That’s what a man is called to
do, to sacrifice for his family. Well my ethnic community is my
extended family”.

26:52

Dixon
at gun training

27:08

Dixon
interview

DWAYNE
DIXON: “I’m not going to let people fly swastikas freely on the streets of
the United States. If we take this back to my grandfather, he would be
appalled. My dad is appalled. I mean this is, this is a
grotesque… I don’t know --- sneer, essentially. Like it’s just spitting in
the face of the efforts of all these men and women who actively fought
against fascism.